The Reformation did not convert the people of Europe to orthodox
Christianity through preaching and catechisms alone. It was the 300 year
period of witch-hunting from the fifteenth to the eighteenth century, what R.H.
Robbins called "the shocking nightmare, the foulest crime and deepest
shame of western civilization." The Church created the elaborate concept of devil worship
and then, used the persecution of it to wipe out dissent, subordinate the
individual to authoritarian control, and openly denigrate women.

The witch hunts were an eruption of orthodox Christianity's vilification of
women, "the weaker vessel," in St. Peter's words. The second century
St. Clement of Alexandria wrote: "Every woman should be filled with shame
by the thought that she is a woman." The Church father Tertullian
explained why women deserve their status as despised and inferior human
beings:

"And do you not know that you are an Eve? The sentence of God on this sex of
yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the
devil's gateway: you are the unsealer of that tree: you are the first
deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was
not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God's image, man. On
account of your desert that is, death even the Son of God had to die."

Others expressed the view more bluntly. The sixth century Christian
philosopher, Boethius, wrote in The Consolation of Philosophy,
"Woman is a temple built upon a sewer." Bishops at the sixth century
Council of Macon voted as to whether or not women had souls. In the tenth century Odo
of Cluny declared, "To embrace a woman is to embrace a sack of
manure..." The thirteenth century St. Thomas Aquinas suggested that God
had made a mistake in creating woman: "nothing [deficient] or defective
should have been produced in the first establishment of things; so woman ought
not to have been produced then." And Lutherans at Wittenberg debated
whether women were really human beings at all. Orthodox Christians held women
responsible for all sin. As the Bible's Apocrypha states, "Of woman came
the beginning of sin/ And thanks to her, we all must die."

Women are often understood to be impediments to spirituality in a context
where God reigns strictly from heaven and demands a renunciation of physical
pleasure. As I Corinthians 7:1 states, "It is a good thing for a man to
have nothing to do with a woman." The Inquisitors who wrote the Malleus
Maleficarum, "The Hammer of the Witches," explained that
women are more likely to become witches than men:

'Because the female sex is more concerned with things of the flesh than
men;' because being formed from a man's rib, they are only 'imperfect
animals' and 'crooked' whereas man belongs to a privileged sex from whose
midst Christ emerged.

King James I estimated that the ratio of women to men who succumbed to
witchcraft was twenty to one. Of those formally persecuted for witchcraft,
between 80 to 90 percent were women.

Christians found fault with women on all sorts of counts. An historian
notes that thirteenth century preachers

...denounced women on the one hand for... the lascivious and carnal
provocation of their garments, and on the other hand for being over-
industrious, too occupied with children and housekeeping, too earthbound to
give due thought to divine things.

According to a Dominican of the same period, woman is "the confusion
of man, an insatiable beast, a continuous anxiety, an incessant warfare, a
daily ruin, a house of tempest ...a hindrance to devotion."

As reformational fervor spread, the feminine aspect of Christianity in the
worship of Mary became suspect. Throughout the Middle Ages, Mary's powers were
believed to effectively curtail those of the devil. But Protestants entirely
dismissed reverence for Mary while reformed Catholics diminished her
importance. Devotion to Mary often became indicative of evil. In the Canary
islands, Aldonca de Vargas was reported to the Inquisition after she smiled at
hearing mention of the Virgin Mary. Inquisitors distorted an image of the
Virgin Mary into a device of torture, covering the front side of a statue of
Mary with sharp knives and nails. Levers would move the arms of the statue
crushing the victim against the knives and nails.

The witch hunts also demonstrated great fear of female sexuality. The book
that served as the manual for understanding and persecuting witchcraft, the Malleus
Maleficarum, describes how witches were known to "collect male
organs in great numbers, as many as twenty or thirty members together, and put
them in a bird's nest..." The manual recounts a story of a man who,
having lost his penis, went to a witch to have it restored:

She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take
which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when
he tried to take a big one, the witch said: You must not take that one;
adding, because it belonged to a parish priest.

A man in 1621 lamented, "of women's unnatural, unsatiable lust... what
country, what village doth not complain."

While most of what became known as witchcraft was invented by Christians,
certain elements of witchcraft did represent an older pagan tradition.
Witchcraft was linked and even considered to be synonymous with
"divination," which means not only the art of foretelling the
future, but also the discovery of knowledge by the aid of supernatural power.
It suggests that there is such power available- something orthodox Christians
insisted could only be the power of the devil, for God was no longer to be
involved with the physical world.

The word "witch" comes from the old English wicce and wicca,
meaning the male and female participants in the ancient pagan tradition which
holds masculine, feminine and earthly aspects of God in great reverence.
Rather than a God which stood above the world, removed from ordinary life,
divinity in the Wiccan tradition was understood to imbue both heaven and
earth. This tradition also recalled a period when human society functioned
without hierarchy- either matriarchal or patriarchal- and without gender,
racial or strict class rankings. It was a tradition that affirmed the
potential for humanity to live without domination and fear, something orthodox
Christians maintain is impossible.

The early Church had tried to eradicate the vestiges of this older
non-hierarchical tradition by denying the existence of witches or magic
outside of the Church. The Canon Episcopi, a Church law which
first appeared in 906, decreed that belief in witchcraft was
heretical. After describing pagan rituals which involved women demonstrating
extraordinary powers, it declared:

For an innumerable multitude, deceived by this false opinion, believe this
to be true and, so believing, wander from the right faith and are involved
in the error of the pagans when they think that there is anything of
divinity or power except the one God.

Nevertheless, the belief in magic was still so prevalent in the fourteenth
century that the Council of Chartres ordered anathema to be pronounced against
sorcerers each Sunday in every church.

It took the Church a long time to persuade society that women were inclined
toward evil witchcraft and devil-worship. Reversing its policy of denying the
existence of witches, in the thirteenth century the Church began depicting the
witch as a slave of the devil. No longer was she or he to be associated with
an older pagan tradition. No longer was the witch to be thought of as
benevolent healer, teacher, wise woman, or one who accessed divine power. She
was now to be an evil satanic agent. The Church began authorizing frightening
portrayals of the devil in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Images of a
witch riding a broom first appeared in 1280. Thirteenth century art also
depicted the devil's pact in which demons would steal children and in which
parents themselves would deliver their children to the devil. The Church now
portrayed witches with the same images so frequently used to characterize
heretics: "...a small clandestine society engaged in anti-human
practices, including infanticide, incest, cannibalism, bestiality and
orgiastic sex..."

The Church developed the concept of devil-worship as an astoundingly
simplistic reversal of Christian rites and practices. Whereas God imposed
divine law, the devil demanded adherence to a pact. Where Christians showed
reverence to God by kneeling, witches paid homage to the devil by standing on
their heads. The sacraments in the Catholic Church became excrements in the
devil's church. Communion was parodied by the Black Mass. Christian prayers
could be used to work evil by being recited backwards. The eucharist bread or
host was imitated in the devil's service by a turnip. The baptismal
"character" or stigmata of the mysteries was parodied by the devil's
mark impressed upon the witch's body by the claw of the devil's left hand.
Whereas saints had the gift of tears, witches were said to be incapable of
shedding tears. Devil worship was a simple parody of Christianity. Indeed, the
very concept of the devil was exclusive to monotheism and had no importance
within the pagan, Wiccan tradition.

The Church also projected its own hierarchical framework onto this new evil
witchcraft. The devil's church was to be organized such that its dignitaries
could climb the ranks to the position of bishop, just like in the Catholic
Church. Julio Caro Baroja explains:

...the Devil causes churches and altars to appear with music... and devils
decked out as saints. The dignitaries reach rank of bishop, and sub-deacons,
deacons and priests serve Mass. Candles and incense are used for the service
and water is sprinkled from a thurifer. There is an offertory, a sermon, a
blessing over the equivalents of bread and wine... So that nothing should be
missing there are even false martyrs in the organization.

Again, such hierarchy was entirely a projection of the Church that bore no
resemblance to ancient paganism. By recognizing both masculine and feminine
faces of God and by understanding God to be infused throughout the physical
world, the Wiccan tradition had no need for strict hierarchical rankings.

Pope John XXII formalized the persecution of witchcraft in 1320 when he
authorized the Inquisition to prosecute sorcery. ." Thereafter papal
bulls and declarations grew increasingly vehement in their condemnation of
witchcraft and of all those who "made a pact with hell." In 1484
Pope Innocent VIII issued the bull Summis desiderantes
authorizing two inquisitors, Kramer and Sprenger, to systematize the
persecution of witches. Two years later their manual, Malleus
Maleficarum, was published with 14 editions following between 1487-1520
and at least 16 editions between 1574-1669. A papal bull in 1488 called upon
the nations of Europe to rescue the Church of Christ which was "imperiled
by the arts of Satan." The papacy and the Inquisition had successfully
transformed the witch from a phenomenon whose existence the Church had
previously rigorously denied into a phenomenon that was deemed very real, very
frightening, the antithesis of Christianity, and absolutely deserving of
persecution.

It was now heresy not to believe in the existence of witches. As
the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum noted, "A belief that
there are such things as witches is so essential a part of Catholic faith that
obstinately to maintain the opposite opinion savors of heresy." Passages
in the Bible such as "Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live" were
cited to justify the persecution of witches. Both Calvin and Knox believed
that to deny witchcraft was to deny the authority of the Bible. The eighteenth
century founder of Methodism, John Wesley, declared to those skeptical of
witchcraft, "The giving up of witchcraft is in effect the giving up of
the Bible." And an eminent English lawyer wrote, "To deny the
possibility, nay, actual existence of Witchcraft and Sorcery, is at once
flatly to contradict the revealed Word of God in various passages both of the
Old and New Testament."

The persecution of witchcraft enabled the Church to prolong the
profitability of the Inquisition. The Inquisition had left regions so
economically destitute that the inquisitor Eymeric complained, "In our
days there are no more rich heretics... it is a pity that so salutary an
institution as ours should be so uncertain of its future." By adding
witchcraft to the crimes it persecuted, however, the Inquisition exposed a
whole new group of people from whom to collect money. It took every advantage
of this opportunity. The author Barbara Walker notes:

Victims were charged for the very ropes that bound them and the wood that
burned them. Each procedure of torture carried its fee. After the execution
of a wealthy witch, officials usually treated themselves to a banquet at the
expense of the victim's estate.

In 1592 Father Cornelius Loos wrote:

Wretched creatures are compelled by the severity of the torture to confess
things they have never done... and so by the cruel butchery innocent lives
are taken; and, by a new alchemy, gold and silver are coined from human
blood.

In many parts of Europe trials for witchcraft began exactly as the trials
for other types of heresy stopped.

The process of formally persecuting witches followed the harshest
inquisitional procedure. Once accused of witchcraft, it was virtually
impossible to escape conviction. After cross- examination, the victim's body
was examined for the witch's mark. The historian Walter Nigg described the
process:

...she was stripped naked and the executioner shaved off all her body hair
in order to seek in the hidden places of the body the sign which the devil
imprinted on his cohorts. Warts, freckles, and birthmarks were considered
certain tokens of amorous relations with Satan.

Should a woman show no sign of a witch's mark, guilt could still be
established by methods such as sticking needles in the accused's eyes. In such
a case, guilt was confirmed if the inquisitor could find an insensitive spot
during the process.

Confession was then extracted by the hideous methods of torture already
developed during earlier phases of the Inquisition. "Loathe they are to
confess without torture," wrote King James I in his Daemonologie.
A physician serving in witch prisons spoke of women driven half mad:

...by frequent torture... kept in prolonged squalor and darkness of their
dungeons... and constantly dragged out to undergo atrocious torment until
they would gladly exchange at any moment this most bitter existence for
death, are willing to confess whatever crimes are suggested to them rather
than to be thrust back into their hideous dungeon amid ever recurring
torture.

Unless the witch died during torture, she was taken to the stake. Since
many of the burnings took place in public squares, inquisitors prevented the
victims from talking to the crowds by using wooden gags or cutting their
tongue out. Unlike a heretic or a Jew who would usually be burnt alive only
after they had relapsed into their heresy or Judaism, a witch would be burnt
upon the first conviction.

Sexual mutilation of accused witches was not uncommon. With the orthodox
understanding that divinity had little or nothing to do with the physical
world, sexual desire was perceived to be ungodly. When the men persecuting the
accused witches found themselves sexually aroused, they assumed that such
desire emanated, not from themselves, but from the woman. They attacked
breasts and genitals with pincers, pliers and red-hot irons. Some rules
condoned sexual abuse by allowing men deemed "zealous Catholics" to
visit female prisoners in solitary confinement while never allowing female
visitors. The people of Toulouse were so convinced that the inquisitor
Foulques de Saint-George arraigned women for no other reason than to sexually
abuse them that they took the dangerous and unusual step of gathering evidence
against him.

The horror of the witch hunts knew no bounds. The Church had never treated
the children of persecuted parents with compassion, but its treatment of
witches' children was particularly brutal. Children were liable to be
prosecuted and tortured for witchcraft: girls, once they were nine and a half,
and boys, once they were ten and a half. Younger children were tortured in
order to elicit testimony that could be used against their parents. Even the
testimony of two-year-old children was considered valid in cases of witchcraft
though such testimony was never admissible in other types of trials. A famous
French magistrate was known to have regretted his leniency when, instead of
having young children accused of witchcraft burned, he had only sentenced them
to be flogged while they watched their parents burn.

Witches were held accountable for nearly every problem. Any threat to
social uniformity, any questioning of authority, and any act of rebellion
could now be attributed to and prosecuted as witchcraft. Not surprisingly,
areas of political turmoil and religious strife experienced the most intense
witch hunts. Witch-hunting tended to be much more severe in Germany,
Switzerland, France, Poland and Scotland than in more homogeneously Catholic
countries such as Italy and Spain. Witch-hunters declared that "Rebellion
is as the sin of Witchcraft." In 1661 Scottish royalists proclaimed that
"Rebellion is the mother of witchcraft." And in England the Puritan
William Perkins called the witch "The most notorious traytor and rebell
that can be..."

The Reformation played a critical role in convincing people to blame
witches for their problems. Protestants and reformed Catholics taught that any
magic was sinful since it indicated a belief in divine assistance in the
physical world. The only supernatural energy in the physical world was to be
of the devil. Without magic to counter evil or misfortune, people were left
with no form of protection other than to kill the devil's agent, the witch.
Particularly in Protestant countries, where protective rituals such as
crossing oneself, sprinkling holy water or calling on saints or guardian
angels were no longer allowed, people felt defenseless. As Shakespeare's
character, Prospero, says in The Tempest:

Now my charms are all o'erthrown,
And what strength I have's mine own,
which is most faint...

It was most often the sermons of both Catholic and Protestant preachers
that would instigate a witch hunt. The terrible Basque witch hunt of 1610
began after Fray Domingo de Sardo came to preach about witchcraft. "[T]here
were neither witches nor bewitched until they were talked and written
about," remarked a contemporary named Salazar. The witch hunts in Salem,
Massachusetts, were similarly preceded by the fearful sermons and preaching of
Samuel Parris in 1692.

The climate of fear created by churchmen of the Reformation led to
countless deaths of accused witches quite independently of inquisitional
courts or procedure. For example, in England where there were no inquisitional
courts and where witch-hunting offered little or no financial reward, many
women were killed for witchcraft by mobs. Instead of following any judicial
procedure, these mobs used methods to ascertain guilt of witchcraft such as
"swimming a witch," where a woman would be bound and thrown into
water to see if she floated. The water, as the medium of baptism, would either
reject her and prove her guilty of witchcraft, or the woman would sink and be
proven innocent, albeit also dead from drowning.

As people adopted the new belief that the world was the terrifying realm of
the devil, they blamed witches for every misfortune. Since the devil created
all the ills of the world, his agents- witches- could be blamed for them.
Witches were thought by some to have as much if not more power than Christ:
they could raise the dead, turn water into wine or milk, control the weather
and know the past and future. Witches were held accountable for everything
from a failed business venture to a poor emotional state. A Scottish woman,
for instance, was accused of witchcraft and burned to death because she was
seen stroking a cat at the same time as a nearby batch of beer turned sour.
Witches now took the role of scapegoats that had been held by Jews. Any
personal misfortune, bad harvest, famine, or plague was seen as their fault.

The social turmoil created by the Reformation intensified witch-hunting.
The Reformation diminished the important role of community and placed a
greater demand for personal moral perfection. As the communal tradition of
mutual help broke down and the manorial system which had provided more
generously for widows disappeared, many people were left in need of charity.
The guilt one felt after refusing to help a needy person could be easily
transferred onto that needy person by accusing her of witchcraft. A
contemporary writer named Thomas Ady described a likely situation resulting
from a failure to perform some hitherto customary social obligation:

Presently [a householder] cryeth out of some poor innocent neighbour that he
or she hath bewitched him. For, saith he, such an old man or woman came
lately to my door and desired some relief, and I denied it, and God forgive
me, my heart did rise against her... and presently my child, my wife,
myself, my horse, my cow, my sheep, my sow, my hog, my dog, my cat, or
somewhat, was thus and thus handled in such a strange manner, as I dare
swear she is a witch, or else how should these things be?

The most common victims of witchcraft accusations were those women who
resembled the image of the Crone. As the embodiment of mature feminine power,
the old wise woman threatens a structure which acknowledges only force and
domination as avenues of power. The Church never tolerated the image of the
Crone, even in the first centuries when it assimilated the prevalent images of
maiden and mother in the figure of Mary. Although any woman who attracted
attention was likely to be suspected of witchcraft, either on account of her
beauty or because of a noticeable oddness or deformity, the most common victim
was the old woman. Poor, older women tended to be the first accused even where
witch hunts were driven by inquisitional procedure that profited by targeting
wealthier individuals.

Old, wise healing women were particular targets for witch-hunters. "At
this day," wrote Reginald Scot in 1584, "it is indifferent to say in
the English tongue, 'she is a witch' or 'she is a wise woman.'" Common
people of pre-reformational Europe relied upon wise women and men for the
treatment of illness rather than upon churchmen, monks or physicians. Robert
Burton wrote in 1621:

Sorcerers are too common; cunning men, wizards and white witches, as they
call them, in every village, which, if they be sought unto, will help almost
all infirmities of body and mind.

By combining their knowledge of medicinal herbs with an entreaty for divine
assistance, these healers provided both more affordable and most often more
effective medicine than was available elsewhere. Churchmen of the Reformation
objected to the magical nature of this sort of healing, to the preference
people had for it over the healing that the Church or Church- licensed
physicians offered, and to the power that it gave women.

Until the terror of the witch hunts, most people did not understand why
successful healers should be considered evil. "Men rather uphold
them," wrote John Stearne, "and say why should any man be questioned
for doing good." As a Bridgettine monk of the early sixteenth century
recounted of "the simple people", "I have heard them say full
often myself... 'Sir, we mean well and do believe well and we think it a good
and charitable deed to heal a sick person or a sick beast'..." And in
1555 Joan Tyrry asserted that "her doings in healing of man and beast, by
the power of God taught to her by the... fairies, be both godly and
good..."

Indeed, the very invocations used by wise women sound quite Christian. For
example, a 1610 poem recited when picking the herb vervain, also known as St.
Johnswort, reads,

Hallowed be thou Vervain, as thou growest on the ground / For in the mount
of Calvary there thou was first found / Thou healest our Saviour, Jesus
Christ, and staunchest his bleeding wound / In the name of the Father, the
Son, and the Holy Ghost / I take thee from the ground.

But in the eyes of orthodox Christians, such healing empowered people to
determine the course of their lives instead of submitting helplessly to the
will of God. According to churchmen, health should come from God, not from the
efforts of human beings. Bishop Hall said, "we that have no power to bid
must pray..." Ecclesiastical courts made the customers of witches
publicly confess to being "heartily sorry for seeking man's help, and
refusing the help of God..." An Elizabethan preacher explained that any
healing "is not done by conjuration or divination, as Popish priests
profess and practice, but by entreating the Lord humbly in fasting and
prayer..." And according to Calvin, no medicine could change the course
of events which had already been determined by the Almighty.

Preachers and Church-licensed male physicians tried to fill the function of
healer. Yet, their ministrations were often considered ineffective compared to
those of a wise woman. The keeper of the Canterbury gaol admitted to freeing
an imprisoned wise woman in 1570 because "the witch did more good by her
physic than Mr. Pudall and Mr. Wood, being preachers of God's word..." A
character in the 1593 Dialogue concerning Witches said of a local
wise woman that, "she doeth more good in one year than all these
scripture men will do so long as they live..."

Even the Church-licensed male physicians, who relied upon purgings,
bleedings, fumigations, leeches, lancets and toxic chemicals such as mercury
were little match for an experienced wise woman's knowledge of herbs. As the
well-known physician, Paracelsus, asked, "...does not the old nurse very
often beat the doctor?" Even Francis Bacon, who demonstrated very little
respect for women, thought that "empirics and old women" were
"more happy many times in their cures than learned physicians..."

Physicians often attributed their own incompetence to witchcraft. As Thomas
Ady wrote:

The reason is ignorantiae pallium maleficium et incantatio- a cloak
for a physician's ignorance. When he cannot find the nature of the disease,
he saith the party is bewitched.

When an illness could not be understood, even the highest body of England,
the Royal College of Physicians of London, was known to accept the explanation
of witchcraft.

Not surprisingly, churchmen portrayed the healing woman as the most evil of
all witches. William Perkins declared, The most horrible and detestable
monster... is the good witch. The Church included in its definition
of witchcraft anyone with knowledge of herbs for "those who used herbs
for cures did so only through a pact with the Devil, either explicit or
implicit." Medicine had long been associated with herbs and magic. The
Greek and Latin words for medicine, "pharmakeia" and "veneficium,"
meant both "magic" and "drugs." Mere possession of herbal
oils or ointments became grounds for accusation of witchcraft.

A person's healing ability easily led to conviction of witchcraft. In 1590
a woman in North Berwick was suspected of witchcraft because she was curing
"all such as were troubled or grieved with any kind of sickness or
infirmity." The ailing archbishop of St. Andrews called upon Alison
Peirsoun of Byrehill and then, after she had successfully cured him, not only
refused to pay her but had her arrested for witchcraft and burned to death.
Simply treating unhealthy children by washing them was cause for convicting a
Scottish woman of witchcraft.

Witch-hunters also targeted midwives. Orthodox Christians believed the act
of giving birth defiled both mother and child. In order to be readmitted to
the Church, the mother should be purified through the custom of
"churching," which consisted of a quarantine period of forty days if
her baby was a boy and eighty days if her baby was a girl, during which both
she and her baby were considered heathen. Some thought that a woman who died
during this period should be refused a Christian burial. Until the
Reformation, midwives were deemed necessary to take care of what was regarded
as the nasty business of giving birth, a dishonorable profession best left in
the hands of women. But with the Reformation came an increased awareness of
the power of midwives. Midwives were now suspected of possessing the skill to
abort a fetus, to educate women about techniques of birth control, and to
mitigate a woman's labor pains.

A midwife's likely knowledge of herbs to relieve labor pains was seen as a
direct affront to the divinely ordained pain of childbirth. In the eyes of
churchmen, God's sentence upon Eve should apply to all women. As stated in
Genesis:

Unto the woman [God] said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy
conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall
be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.

To relieve labor pains, as Scottish clergymen put it, would be "vitiating
the primal curse of woman..." The introduction of chloroform to help a
woman through the pain of labor brought forth the same opposition. According
to a New England minister:

Chloroform is a decoy of Satan, apparently offering itself to bless women;
but in the end it will harden society and rob God of the deep earnest cries
which arise in time of trouble, for help.

Martin Luther wrote, "If [women] become tired or even die, that does
not matter. Let them die in childbirth that is why they are there." It is
hardly surprising that women who not only possessed medicinal knowledge but
who used that knowledge to comfort and care for other women would become prime
suspects of witchcraft.

How many lives were lost during the centuries of witch- hunting will never
be known. Some members of the clergy proudly reported the number of witches
they condemned, such as the bishop of Wurtzburg who claimed 1900 lives in five
years, or the Lutheran prelate Benedict Carpzov who claimed to have sentenced
20,000 devil worshippers. But the vast majority of records have been lost and
it is doubtful that such documents would have recorded those killed outside of
the courts.

Contemporary accounts hint at the extent of the holocaust. Barbara Walker
writes that "the chronicler of Treves reported that in the year 1586, the
entire female population of two villages was wiped out by the inquisitors,
except for only two women left alive." Around 1600 a man wrote:

Germany is almost entirely occupied with building fires for the witches...
Switzerland has been compelled to wipe out many of her villages on their
account. Travelers in Lorraine may see thousands and thousands of the stakes
to which witches are bound.

While the formal persecution of witches raged from about 1450 to 1750,
sporadic killing of women on the account of suspected witchcraft has continued
into recent times. In 1928 a family of Hungarian peasants was acquitted of
beating an old woman to death whom they claimed was a witch. The court based
its decision on the ground that the family had acted out of "irresistible
compulsion." In 1976 a poor spinster, Elizabeth Hahn, was suspected of
witchcraft and of keeping familiars, or devil's agents, in the form of dogs.
The neighbors in her small German village ostracized her, threw rocks at her,
and threatened to beat her to death before burning her house, badly burning
her and killing her animals. A year later in France, an old man was killed for
ostensible sorcery. And in 1981, a mob in Mexico stoned a woman to death for
her apparent witchcraft which they believed had incited the attack upon Pope
John Paul II.

Witch hunts were neither small in scope nor implemented by a few aberrant
individuals; the persecution of witches was the official policy of both the
Catholic and Protestant Churches. The Church invented the crime of witchcraft,
established the process by which to prosecute it, and then insisted that
witches be prosecuted. After much of society had rejected witchcraft as a
delusion, some of the last to insist upon the validity of witchcraft were
among the clergy. Under the pretext of first heresy and then witchcraft,
anyone could be disposed of who questioned authority or the Christian view of
the world.

Witch-hunting secured the conversion of Europe to orthodox Christianity.
Through the terror of the witch hunts, reformational Christians convinced
common people to believe that a singular male God reigned from above, that he
was separate from the earth, that magic was evil, that there was a powerful
devil, and that women were most likely to be his agents. As a by-product of
the witch hunts, the field of medicine transferred to exclusively male hands
and the Western herbal tradition was largely destroyed. The vast numbers of
people brutalized and killed, as well as the impact upon the common perception
of God, make the witch hunts one of the darkest chapters of human history.

Over a period of almost two millennia, the Christian Church
has oppressed and brutalized millions of individuals in an attempt to control
and contain spirituality. The Dark Side of Christian History
reveals, in painstaking detail, the tragedies, sorrows and injustices
inflicted upon humanity by the Church.

"This is simply a book that everyone must sit down and
read. At a time when the so called 'religious right' asserts that Christian
values will save society from its rampant sins, the ordinary citizen should
know exactly how the Christian Church has attempted to save societies in the
past. It is a grim lesson, but one that it is imperative to absorb.." --Alice
Walker, author of The Color Purple, Possessing the
Secret of Joy, The Temple of My Familiar, et al.